It’s interesting to hear a chief executive of a major Wall Street firm speak openly and on the record about the economy. So, it’s refreshing to watch this video and see Jamie Dimon’s take on a number of economic issues ncluding house prices and infrastructure spending.

A few days ago, I showed you a video from a long session he did with Erin Burnett of CNBC. This is another segment of that session. On the whole, he sounds very reasonable. Take a look.

Jamie Dimon on the Economy

This video from the 1930s is a timeless piece of work, giving an explanation of what inflation and deflation are and how they work. (hat tip Tim Iacono)

December is a big month for Hollywood as some of the biggest and most critically acclaimed movies come out in December. One such movie is “The Reader” starring Kate Winslet. I am a big fan, so I thought I’d provide you with a little distraction from the usual fare of dismal economic news with a short clip from the film.

Enjoy.

Jamie Dimon tells it like it is. When asked by CNBC’s Erin Burnett’s how business is going, Dimon replied “terrible.” Here’s how Reuters describes his comments: “November itself has been a terrible trading month … (and) December so far is pretty terrible,” Jamie Dimon told CNBC. “It will be a tough quarter.” Dimon said he was referring to the trading, loans and mortgage segments of the largest U.S. bank.

The holiday season is the second most important for the movie studios and many of their academy-award nominees are released in the time after Thanksgiving (the 4th Thursday of November) to take advantage of the holiday cheer.
One film released this summer, the Dark Knight, is talked about, not because of Chrstian Bale, its star, but [...]

The Tribune was simply over-leveraged with a balance sheet made for this age of debt, leverage and bubbles. Note the lack of equity and the enormous debt load. Why would anyone, especially someone as savvy as Sam Zell load up a declining business with this much debt? Was it greed, hubris? It seems inexplicable to me.

Marc Faber is a hard money, old school investor who thinks that the U.S. government is going to reflate in order to avoid depression and that means gold. But, for those of you who don’t know economic history, the fact is that this has been tried before, in the Great Depression in the 1930s and the result was that the government had to confiscate Americans’ gold. It was Executive Order 6102 signed on 5 April 1933 right after Franklin Roosevelt came to office and it forbade all Americans from owning physical gold assets.

The renowned money manager Jeremy Grantham has had his first television interview ever with Consuelo Mack on Mack’s program WealthTrack. Below is the video from that interview. Mack has promised to make a longer video available to those who subscribe to her podcast. Please find the podcast audio link here and the podcast video link here.

Yesterday morning, I heard Louise Yamada on Tom Keene’s show on Bloomberg Radio giving her assessment that stocks may break below 2002 lows. I mentioned this in yesterday’s news round-up. But, now I have the audio for you as well.
Yamada is a much followed technical analyst so her opinion has weight. Since at least [...]

I have been tied up with other activities all day today. But, I just had to send this post on Peter Schiff. My brother-in-law sent me this video a second ago of Schiff predicting doom and gloom on YouTube. And it’s actually kind of funny to look back and see what he was saying in 2006 and 2007 and how he was pilloried. His calls were uncannily right on the money.